


Target Practice

by ladysisyphus



Category: Alias Smith and Jones
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-22
Updated: 2010-02-22
Packaged: 2017-12-10 12:57:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/786277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladysisyphus/pseuds/ladysisyphus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Now when I say 'aim'," said Curry, "what I usually mean is you should point the gun <i>at</i> what you're fixin' to hit, or else you're not going to be fixin' to hit it at all."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Target Practice

"Now when I say 'aim'," said Curry, "what I usually mean is you should point the gun _at_ what you're fixin' to hit, or else you're not going to be fixin' to hit it at all."

Heyes stared down the rusty but otherwise undamaged cans perched on the far log and tried not to think about what a much easier target the man standing next to him would make. He was glad that they were still a piece from the main hideout, and gladder still that his instructions to the rest of the gang to _git_ meant they'd gotten, all right, but he was starting to weigh the balance of how much better target practice might go with an audience of none. It was only the fact the answer he kept coming up with was 'no better than it had for two decades previous' that kept him from chasing away the baby-faced sharpshooter they'd taken on a few months back. As Jim would've said, a man good with his trade offers to teach it to you, you swallow your pride and you damn well learn it, else you never get another chance.

Of course, Heyes thought as he extended his arm and levelled the pistol just below the length of his eye, Big Jim Santana was serving a seven-year stretch, so maybe his advice hasn't worth what it'd once been.

His thumb stretched back the hammer, and he yanked the trigger hard, sending another thunderous crash rolling through the high mountains and startling a flock of birds that had foolishly thought it might be safe enough again to take up residence in a nearby tree. The cans on the fence, however, looked far less impressed than the animals, and a bush far behind them twitched harmlessly as it caught the slug instead. Plumb fed up with how it had met approximately the same fate as the nine previous, Heyes scuffed his boot in the dirt, sending a shower of little rocks toward the cans. "I think they're gettin' real good at dodging."

From behind him, he heard a little snort, though he was relieved to see that by the time he spun on his heel, Curry's face was as blankly smug as it ever was, and not especially amused on Heyes' behalf. "You're just mad because you can't sweet-talk a bullet," Curry said, folding his arms across his scrawny chest.

"Why I prefer the sweet talk to the bullets." Heyes gave the gun a frown as though it might be betraying him on purpose.

This time Curry didn't bother to disguise the rolling of his eyes, and the only thing that kept Heyes from snapping at him was the way Curry startled him by snatching the (empty now, Heyes had been counting) pistol from his hand. "Who ever heard of a gang leader that can't shoot?" He half-cocked the hammer, thumbed the cylinder open, and pushed five more bullets in, leaving the first chamber under the hammer unloaded.

"Maybe I'm starting a trend," grumbled Heyes, not bothering to keep the frustration from his voice. He'd talked his way into leading the gang mostly because he'd wanted to see if he _could_ talk his way into it, and now that he'd done it, he was starting to regret ever having opened his big stupid mouth. He'd managed to keep a straight face around the others all through the past few months, same as he'd ever worn from the moment he stumbled into Devil's Hole, but damn him if the stupid kid shooter didn't bring out the baldfaced worst in him.

"Come on. Any idiot with a gun can kill a man." Curry turned the pistol in his hand so he was holding the barrel, extending the butt of the gun toward Heyes but keeping it just out of easy reach. "You gonna yell at me if I give you a couple pointers?"

It took every bit of Jim's voice he still had ringing through his ears for Heyes to beat down his knee-jerk reaction to that one and say truthfully, "No, you go ahead."

"Then here." Curry held the pistol closer so Heyes could take it back, but didn't let go once Heyes had a hold of it, moving instead so it was like _Curry_ was the one holding the gun -- if the gun had the rather nonstandard design feature of including Heyes' whole hand about its grip. He wasn't any taller or wider than Heyes, but his hands were big and knobby, all knuckles like he wasn't even out of his teenage years; he said he was twenty-one, but folk in their line of work didn't usually get very far telling the whole truth about themselves, so there was a limit to what you could tell about a man just based on what he chose to tell you. Even if Curry _did_ seem a bit more forthright than most, lying and lying about one's age were two wholly separate categories in the confession booth. ...Not, of course, that Quakers like the Heyeses had ever or would ever set foot inside a Catholic church, but the principle of the thing still stood.

Heyes started to extend his arm again toward shooting position, and was surprised to feel resistance from Curry's hand, so instead of fighting it, he let Curry guide him into a stance that was less from the shoulder and more from the hip. "You _do_ realize this makes the aiming of it harder," he pointed out, feeling even more detached from the weapon than he had just a few minutes previous.

Curry shrugged, leaning closer and pressing against the middle of Heyes' back with his left shoulder, so Heyes pulled his spine taller and set his own shoulders back, drawing his elbow back closer to his body. "That's because you're trying to _see_ where it goes." Curry clenched his hand, urging Heyes to get a tighter grip on the gun, and Heyes did, sliding his thumb a little closer to the hammer and rocking the grip lower into his palm. "So you're looking at your gun, not at what you want your gun to hit."

"I am _not_ \--" Heyes started, but he shushed himself as soon as he realized that the hell of it was, the damn kid was right. But now, with his arm tucked tighter against his side and the pistol gripped tight, braced for the recoil with his elbow just at his hipbone, the barrel of the gun barely even grazed the bottom range of his field of vision, meaning that he could either look at it, or he could look at the target. And he had a pretty good idea of where it was Curry'd rather his eyes be.

With one last nudge of Heyes' arm even closer to his body, Curry let go and stepped back a foot or so, just far enough away so that Heyes couldn't see him, but could still _feel_ him there. "And take your shot," he said, low and steady and sounding like he was wearing the shit-eatingest grin ever put on the face of a man.

He wasn't what most people might call a vain man, or even a particularly proud one, but Hannibal Heyes was still damned if he was going to let himself be shown up by some cocky tinhorn barely grown out of his big brother's hand-me-down boots whose only grace (despite his family's good fortune to be from the same general area of Kansas as the Heyeses) was being able to put a stupid piece of lead into a stupid empty bean tin with vague reliability. Not even bother to keep the grit of his teeth from showing on his face, he stared down that damned can with all the force of a flash flood down a box canyon, pointed the pistol in its general direction with the express intent of failing just to show that baby-faced braggart just how wrong of a stance it was, raked back the hammer with his thumb, and squeezed the trigger.

The can jumped up into the air like water thrown onto a hot griddle, and Heyes was so simultaneously impressed and outraged by the fact that the damn fool advice had _worked_ that he squeezed off four more rounds in quick succession, and as the ensuing roar rolled on down the mountains and faded out into the sky, five tin cans lay still on the ground, dusty and sporting new holes.

"Hot _damn_!" Curry grinned and clapped him on the shoulder, leaving his big paw hand resting against the fabric of Heyes' shirt just below the leather of his vest. "Looks like you've got a knack for it."

"Lucky shots," Heyes shrugged, keeping his eyes focused on the business of reloading the gun. It occured to the rational part of him that he was just downplaying his _own_ accomplishments here, but at the moment it seemed worth it not to let that pesky kid's smugness be justified.

"Lucky sho--" With a disgusted sigh, Curry threw up his hands. "You are the _most stubborn_ sumbitch I've ever met, you know that?"

That, too, was something Jim had said more than once (well, not in so many words, and with a much different accent, but the sentiment still stood), but when Jim had said it, Heyes had always taken it as the compliment as it had been intended; when Curry said it, his frustration beamed clear through the words like they were glass, and when they shone down on Heyes' own frustration -- at shooting, at the gang, at having to admit to not being the best at something when it was his _job_ now to be the best -- the effect was blinding. "You watch your tongue, kid," he growled in the deepest register he could muster, and turned sharply toward Curry, poking at his chest with the empty gun as though it were some extra-long, extra-emphatic finger.

Curry's quickdrawn turned out to be not only for drawing from his holster, as faster than Heyes could blink, Curry had smacked the pistol from his hand and sent it flying across the dirt. " _Never_ point a gun at anything you don't mean to shoot!" Curry shouted at him, and it was stupid obvious, a piece of gun safety Heyes'd had drilled into his head from the time he'd been big enough to remember putting his small hands on the cold barrels of his father's hunting rifle, except having to hear the kid tell him something _else_ so stupid obvious threw a match into the powderkeg of his temper, and he up and exploded.

"What makes you think I _didn't_ mean to shoot you?" he hollered back, flexing his right hand into a painful fist; it stung from where he'd had the Colt struck out of his grip, and he was so spitting mad about the blow it didn't occur to him until much later to wonder how much damage Curry's own hand had taken.

"Well, I ain't _worried_ , since I don't think you could _hit_ me if you _did_ mean to!" yelled Curry, who pushed up so far into Heyes' personal space that they were practically chest-to-chest, then lifted his hand to the middle of Heyes' chest and shoved him hard.

Heyes stumbled back a few steps, then found his footing and stared Curry down with narrowed eyes, all the scattered, messy anger he'd been wrestling with suddenly submerged beneath an icy lake of pure, calm rage. He hooked his thumbs in the pockets of his pants, then took one long stride forward, making up the ground he'd been forced to give, pulling up every inch of his height he could summon. "You don't want to try that again, kid."

"I'm not a damn _kid_!" Curry shouted, punctuating the last word with the same sudden push as before, and this time when Heyes came back, he came back swinging.

 

~*~

 

He woke up because he'd rolled onto the side of his face in his sleep, and the side of his face felt like someone'd dragged it along behind a horse for a few mountain miles. He half-remembered getting beat bloody, and somewhat-less-than-half-remembered making an effort to give as good as he'd got, and barely recalled after how they'd staggered back to the edge of where anyone'd cared to wait for them, leaning arm-over-arm and bleeding on each other's shirts. Past that was just a haze of whiskey poured a little over his cuts and a lot down his throat, and then collapsing on the makeshift cot that still smelled like Big Jim, if Heyes held his head just right.

Of course, now he wasn't smelling much of anything, and when he dragged the sleeve of his undershirt across his aching nose, it came away smeared with almost-dried blood. The morning sunlight cracked through the window and lit the far wall, and little flecks of dust spun their lazy circles inside it, in no particular hurry to get anywhere. He lay there watching the beam creep across nearly three entire floorboards' worth of space before he kicked his feet out of the bed and sat up with a pained grunt.

It was well past daybreak, but Jim's cabin at least was quiet, and as he made his cautious way barefoot across the rough-hewn floor, he neither heard nor saw any human movement that wasn't his own fault in the first place. The day would warm up just fine as it went on, especially with the clear blue sky like the one he saw through the leaded glass, but the sunlight hadn't yet chased off all the chill of the dry mountain night, and his joints complained about the cold with every step he took. Maybe he'd go out a little later, kick someone awake to pour last night's coffee through last night's grounds and give him something to drink worth waking up for, but he had something to do first.

When he pushed his way past the half-open door to the other room in the cabin, he found a pair of blue eyes ready to meet him, one wide, one peeking out half-lidded from behind a puffy purple curtain. "You look like I feel," Heyes said, leaning against the door frame with his left shoulder, which he figured was the less bruised of the two.

"That a fact?" Curry cleared his throat and made as though to sit himself up, though the effort mostly accomplished getting him propped up a little on one elbow. "Well, you look worse."

To hell with that curly-haired bastard, Heyes thought as he grinned so wide it split his bottom lip open again. "I want you to go equal with me on everything."

He at least had the satisfaction of seeing that one knock that smug expression right off Curry's face. "...Come again?"

"I need a partner." Heyes folded his arms across his chest in the most commanding, authoritative pose he could manage, ignoring like hell how it seemed like all his bones and muscles had joined together in a rousing chorus of _what in God's name is your problem?_ "You told me any idiot with a gun can kill a man. I think if you and me can be better than that, maybe we won't have to."

A slow smile raised the side of Curry's mouth on the good side of his face, at least, and for a moment, Heyes could see his blue eyes sparkle through the damage his knuckles had caused. He was a smart one, Heyes knew, too damned smart for his own good, but that was a problem Heyes knew well enough from both sides of the mirror, and he figured two guys too smart together stood a better chance of being just stupid enough to stay alive. "I think I get the picture," Curry nodded, fixing Heyes with a steel-steady look.

"Besides," Heyes shrugged, "I figure it's best the one guy -- and you'll never hear me say that again or in the presence of another living soul, and if you repeat it I'll deny it all the way to my grave _and_ all the way to yours -- I can trust to kick my ass if I need him to."

Curry clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, and Heyes got the small pleasure of watching him wince as he did it. "Weren't exactly what I'd call difficult."

Heyes rolled his eyes and very manfully kept his exaggerated sigh brief enough to keep from triggering his aching ribs into setting off a coughing fit. "You know, you're the only guy I've ever met whose mouth is _more_ likely than mine to get him into trouble, kid."

"Oh for--" Curry collapsed back against the pillows, grunting as he did. "I'm not going to be your partner if you keep calling me that."

"You keep telling yourself that, kid," Heyes grinned, and he turned to leave just in time to catch the spare cot's expertly thrown pillow in the back of the head. Despite injury and indignity, today was shaping up to be a pretty fine day.


End file.
